A while ago I started following a local beauty salon on Facebook and unusually for me I haven’t yet muted them in my news feed.
It struck me a few days ago that not only were their Facebook updates coming from Twitter (including @ mentions and # – grr) but that there were only about six of them on a rotation. So I’d seen the one about the so-and-so having a mani/pedi before a Christening at the weekend. And the one about the staff doing some training. And the one about signing up for the newsletter. In fact I’d seen them all a few times.
Having got my annoyance in check and muted that feed I got to thinking whether local government would get away with a loop of scheduled updates to social networks. And then I got to thinking, why ever would they want to?
Local gov is such a melting pot of different services that if we did a scheduled loop of one tweet per service it would take us more than a year to come back to the start (and that’s pretty amazing if you ask me).
It was a happy coincidence then that Louise Kidney suggested the hashtag #1515gov at around the same time I was slack-jawed at the vibrant variety of services. The basic idea is that local gov folk post a Twitter update at 3.15pm each working day about what they are doing right then, in that minute.
Lou plans to run the hashtag for at least a month and already it’s showing the variety of work that is happening and the way people feel about what they do.
If you work in government (local, central or an associated agency) do check out the #1515gov hashtag and post if you can.
And if you do the online stuff for a local beauty salon please make your loop longer or, even better, stop looping at all and actually engage!
This sums up perfectly what I hoped would happen but wasn’t sure would. My inspiration was kind of A day in the life – it left a big impression, lots of snapshots stitched together to tell a story which might end up being more than the individual parts.
I also really was proper embarrassed that I don’t know what half the people in my own org do on a day to day basis. Simple to find out – ask :0)
I hope it ends up telling that bigger story too – or at least beginning to. Hopefully it will show the variety of services carried out on a daily basis, and I guess because of the people choosing to get involved, the passion of some of the people behind those services.
Looking forward to seeing all these parts stitched together into a #1515gov quilt 🙂